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On September 29, three talented young researchers were awarded
the “Life Sciences Bridge Award 2022”: Dr. Julian Grünewald, Dr. Christoph Kuppe and Dr. Melanie Schirmer.
At a festive award ceremony in Frankfurt’s Senckenberg Museum, the winners received the Aventis Foundation Postdoctoral Award, each endowed with a subsidy amount of € 100,000.
By granting the Life Sciences Bridge Award, the Aventis Foundation aims to provide individual support to talented researchers, to enable them to conduct their own independent research at the earliest possible stage and encourage them to pursue bold and unconventional ideas.
Each year, the awards will be granted in cooperation with specific scientific institutions.
For 2022, the Foundation partnered with research-intensive German universities.
The awards will be given to academics with a doctorate or habilitation, junior professors and tenure track professors who aim for an academic career but do not yet hold full and permanent professorship. Left to right: Prof. Dr. Werner Müller-Esterl, Dr. Christoph Kuppe, Dr. Melanie Schirmer, Dr. Julian Grünewald, Prof. Dr. Rudi Balling, Prof. Dr. Günther Wess
Julian Grünewald (36), MD, has made significant contributions to the advancement of gene editing as a post-doctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. His research focuses on the optimization and application of base editors and prime editors. Read more
Christoph Kuppe (37), MD, began specializing in renal medicine during his medical studies. His research focuses on the molecular decoding of chronic renal failure, which affects ten percent of the world’s population. Read more
Dr. phil. Melanie Schirmer (39), has succeeded in pioneering analyses of the gut microbiome. Her research focuses on chronic inflammatory bowel diseases. The mathematician uses methods to find out how the interaction of around ten trillion microbes in our large intestine ensures the maintenance of health or the development of disease. Read more
© Uwe Dettmar